A quotation from Niccolò Machiavelli
Quotation
It is far safer to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.
Philosophical Context
Early ModernPoliticalNiccolò Machiavelli
He separated what princes do from what moralists say they should do, and called the gap by its right name.
Machiavelli spent fourteen years as a senior diplomat of the Florentine Republic, negotiating with popes, emperors, and condottieri, watching how power actually worked. When the Medici returned and the Republic fell in 1512, he was arrested, tortured, and exiled to his small farm outside Florence. There he wrote The Prince: a short, unsentimental guide to acquiring and keeping power that has shocked and fascinated readers ever since. Its central claim is that the political world is governed by different rules than private morality: a prince who insists on being good in all things will come to ruin among so many who are not. Force and fraud, used with intelligence and restraint, are the instruments of effective governance. The Discourses on Livy, written at the same time, presents his republican ideals: a stable state requires citizen virtue, institutional conflict, and the rule of law. The two books are not contradictory but bracketing: The Prince is for founders who must act in emergency; the Discourses are for the republic that follows.
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What does Niccolò Machiavelli mean by this quotation?
He separated what princes do from what moralists say they should do, and called the gap by its right name. Machiavelli spent fourteen years as a senior diplomat of the Florentine Republic, negotiating with popes, emperors, and condottieri, watching how power actually worked. When the Medici returned and the Republic fell in 1…
What was the context or school of thought behind this idea?
Niccolò Machiavelli articulated this thought in The Prince. Written in forced retirement after prison and torture, a short manual on acquiring and keeping states that changed political thought by a single decision: to describe how power actually works rather t…